Warhammer 40k Gladius Relics of War

New Assault Pack DLC ($4) is out along with the 1.6.0 update and the 1.6.1 open beta. Good times! Was afraid the Complete Edition would mean end of development.

Assault Pack brings new units for each faction. Bit of a milking, I know, but I'm ok with it. Sadly I have nowhere near enough time to try it out.

Will keep you posted, even if it's a solitary job, for I know no fear.

Does it have co-op multiplayer?

Not the best Lets Play, but he talks about multiplayer (which I have no intention of trying) in the beginning:

There's a new DLC, Craftworld Aeldari. Haven't had time to test it out, but hopefully will soon. The Eldar are the glass cannons of WH40k, so there will be some interesting battles ahead. And apprently they can only build cities on top of webways. Interested to see how that works.

Will keep you posted.

I did more testing, 5 PTs altogether (seriously, I don’t know where I found the time to do that ). Two games as Space Marines, one as Necrons and two as the Eldar. Now I’m convinced that the Eldar DLC wasn’t very well thought of, or at least the single player game wasn’t.

First game as the Eldar, my opposition was Orks, Necrons and teamed up Space Marines with the Guard. All were souped up to the max. I was sure that the Imperial forces would run me over, but no. I was so far ahead in the tech tree that it was I who overran everyone. Oh well.

Second game, same setup. This time my starting location gave me trouble in the form of local wildlife and I advanced slowly. Tech-wise I was on a par with the others, but nothing really can stop Wraithknights coupled with Scorpios. I mean the Orks had 8 Gorkanauts and the Necrons 4 Obelisks and they went down like punks.

Time to switch sides. I played Space Marines and the opposition was Orks, Tyranids, Necrons and the Eldar. As the RNG would have it, the Eldar started right next to me. Early game fighting ensued, but there wasn’t much of a competition, as you can imagine, in the battle between Glass cannons and Real Cannons. On to the next.

Fourth game, same setup as before. I didn’t see much, but according to statistics The Eldar did okay. They didn’t build heavy units though. I’m guessing they couldn’t get cities built fast enough and were overran by Tyranids.

Fifth game, switched to Necrons. Necrons are one of my favourites, so I had to give everyone else a big boost, namely the Orks, Tyranids, Chaos and the Eldar. This was the best Eldar performance I’ve seen so far. They actually had Wraithknights, but no Scorpios. I ran into their army with my Monoliths and Obelisks; a pitched battle followed, where I was careful not to lose any units. In the end they fled, but my Doom Scythes gave chase and finally mowed the Wraithknights down. I lost some Doom Scythes but they lost an army, so it was over.

Was it fun and did I get my money’s worth? Most definitely. Would I recommend it now? It depends. The DLC is wildly off balance and the AI is in serious trouble as the Eldar. It doesn’t have the ability to protect and secure the gates it needs for future cities. The gates are fragile and you have to time your cities pretty perfectly; claim a gate too early, and it is quickly destroyed. For a human player this is obvious, as is the fact that you can offset the slow growth rate by building cities as fast as possible. The resource gathering to achieve this is a breeze, since your early game infantry only needs food for their upkeep. However, since it is possible to tweak difficulty individually for each faction, there is a chance that an artificial balance at least could be found. And guess who is already itching to try to find it...

The starting units seem to be hard coded, since I can't find a file that would work. The obvious line in

<startingUnits>
<unit type="Eldar/Guardian" count="2"/>
</startingUnits>

did nothing. I'll see if I can think of a workaround.

So, the latest version is 1.7.3 which addresses most of the issues I have been raving about. If only they had waited for a month before launching the DLC, right? Right, I guess most of us know how these things work, so... I'm happy for the update; it nerfs Wraithknights and there is a new tech for building cities, so rapid city deployment is out.

That said, I'm going to take a break from this thread, it's only a week until Christmas and there's lots to do. Happy Holidays and Happy Warhammering everyone! Cheers!

It took a while, but think I finally got to the bottom of the screwy balance issues. The Eldar DLC introduced two new neutral things to shoot at, the webwaygates and the Umbras, and apparently this was a bit too much for the AI to handle. Given the choice to either shoot at a monstrous enemy unit or at a harmless inanimate webwaygate, the AI will always choose the gate. Add the Umbras, flying, non-melee attackable dangerous monsters and you have a problem.

What I did was, I modded the hitpoints of webwaygates from 32 to 16. Then in the advanced settings I set the amount of wildlife to low and the amount of gates to very low. This would seem to get the best results. It's hardly ideal, but it will bring the AI to it's pre-Eldar competency. Needless to say, if one of your factions is the Eldar, you may wan't to play with the settings to be able to build more cities.

I picked up Gladius because it was on sale on GOG and because I'm a 40k fan. I also got most of the DLC, except for Tau and Eldar (because this thread scared me).

So far I'm not good at it at all, but I'm having fun. I played through the introduction and now started a game as Astra Militarum and those frakking enslavers already screwed me over. But on the bright side, the Commissar occasionally says "What would Cain do...", so there's that...